Florentia (Roman city)

With the Iron Age the Florentine area is affected by Villanovan settlements, which are evidenced by the burials of the eighth century BC found between 1892 and 1906 in the historic center, towards Via de 'Vecchietti and under today's ex-Gambrinus, in Piazza della Repubblica.

l'antico ponte de' Fiesolani, il quale era da Girone a Candegghi [oggi Girone e Candeli, frazioni fiorentine] : e quella era l'antica e diritta strada e cammino da Roma a FiesoleThis agglomeration was perhaps an outpost built at the time of the civil war between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla won by the party of the latter who then provided the conquest of the colony fiesolana favorable to the party of Mario.

The Liber Coloniarum attributes to a lex Iulia agris limitandis metiundis, wanted by Gaius Julius Caesar, the will to give birth to a new urban system in this part of the Arno valley, where it crossed the river at the height of Ponte Vecchio.

L'elegante tempio di Marte, ammirazione ancora dei presenti quantunque a fronte della mole sublime del Duomo, presenta i suoi lati ottagoni[...] [così] che ovunque avesse spirato il vento dovesse stendersi il braccio ferreo del Dio guerriero.The city, in the meantime was expanding in all directions, to the north in the religious area of the Temple of Mars and then the ancient church of Santa Reparata, south to the river and even beyond the Arno where he settled a colony of Syrian traders within which developed the first nucleus of Christians in the city.

The first who made an in-depth study of this structure was the scholar Domenico Maria Manni who in 1746 published the book Notizie istoriche intorno al Parlagio ovvero anfiteatro di Firenze.

In the nineteenth century some of the names of the streets around Piazza della Repubblica were chosen on the basis of the Roman findings in the underground: via delle Terme, via del Campidoglio, via di Capaccio (i.e. of Caput Aquae, the outlet of the aqueduct, which Nuova Cronica by Giovanni Villani is assigned to Macrino, general of Caesar).

But the most interesting evidence of Roman Etruria is the archaeological area of Fiesole, with the theater almost intact and the baths, already from the Republican era, which were embellished under the emperors Claudius and Septimus Severus.

Like all Roman colonies, also for Florentia was performed the centuriation of the surrounding territory and in particular of the flat and presumably marshy area west of the city that was simultaneously reclaimed in order to obtain plots of land to be assigned to veteran legionaries.

The geometric regularity of the fields in the few areas not yet urbanized is a legacy of the vast Roman land reclamation, connected to the colony of Florentia, which extended over the entire plain between Florence and Prato, reconnecting to the centuriation of Pistoriae (Pistoia).

From the cartographic results it was possible to reconstruct the scheme of the centuriation as a whole, made up of squares of about 710 meters of side[11] At the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, Florentia was a thriving city thanks to trade, the Arno, as testified by Strabo, was a river still navigable and at the height of today's Piazza de 'Giudici (others place the port in the next piazza Mentana) there were docks, more or less where today there is the Rowing Club Florence, for loading and unloading of goods in the area that is still called the Customs.

The suburbs of Oltrarno, where lived a large community of oriental traders, especially Syrians, were the cradle of the new religions, both Mithras and the Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis (a temple dedicated to her was in Piazza San Firenze) and Christianity.

The oriental religions of a mysterious type because of the hold they had on the "vile people" worried the Florentine patriciate, but the greatest danger was the influence that the religious leaders of Christianity had on the crowds.

Categoria:Chiarire Between the first and second century the city was fully part of the vast and organized commercial system of the Roman Empire, thanks to the river port, which allowed trade with Pisa.

[13] Between the sixth and the eighth century, probably, came into crisis even the urban structure of the city, with the demographic decline, the abandonment of the outer areas and the general and progressive degradation of all buildings and walls.

With the Savoy arrangement of the Piazza del Mercato Vecchio, at the time of Florence as the capital of Italy (the so-called Risanamento), the Ghetto was demolished and with it the most important remains of the Capitol and the Forum disappeared.

Almost all of the Roman art present in Florence today, apart from a few rare examples of sarcophagi mentioned above, did not belong to Florentia, but was brought from Rome at the time of the Medici and Lorena families.

The city's other Roman obelisk, located in Piazza Santa Trinita in front of the church of the same name, comes from the Baths of Caracalla, a gift from Pope Pius IV to Grand Duke Cosimo I.